The science of military forensic identification traces its roots back to the American Revolution and one of its most renowned protagonists. Best remembered today for his midnight ride, Paul Revere performed a variety of roles in Boston, such as gold and silversmith, engraver, and dentist. (Setting himself up perfectly for such puns as “Paul Revere, a true journeyman” and “Revere was never the type to pick one horse and stick to it.”) In 1776, he added pioneer in the field of forensic science to his multi-feathered cap by identifying the dental remains of a fallen major general.

By the start of the American Revolution, Revere had established himself as a patriot. He participated in the Boston Tea Party in 1773 and served as the principle rider for Boston’s Committee of Safety. In April 1775, the committee’s chairman, Joseph Warren, instructed the forty-year-old Revere to go on his most famous ride, in order to warn the citizens of Lexington and Concord of the impending arrival of British troops.

After the first skirmishes broke out, Warren traveled to the area to help prepare the militia. In recognition of this work, he was named second general in command of the Massachusetts forces. At the Battle of Bunker Hill that June, he was killed during the third British assault on Breed’s Hill. The British buried Major General Warren in common mass grave outside of Boston.

The following year the colonists regained the area and some of Warren’s loved ones searched for his remains, hoping to reinter him in an individual grave. When Revere recognized a dental prosthetic that he had created for Warren, they knew they had found the major general. According to the National Museum of Health and Medicine, this event stands as the first time that dental remains led to the identification of a military service member in the United States.

Respected historian Carl Becker once defined his field as “the memory of things said and done.” As a collective, we like to remember the dramatic, the mythic. Public memory tends to position Paul Revere’s place in history as atop a horse, valiantly racing through Massachusetts while shouting warnings that the British were coming. But Revere also earned himself a place in the record books with the simple, the almost ordinary, as a metalworking dentist who desired to honor a fallen friend and inadvertently became a pioneer in military forensic science.